Read it through once

It is a common mistake to minimize the importance and value of the aristocratic rule by which the government of England was graded down from the high exercise of royal power under the Tudors and Stuarts to that beneficial exercise of royal influence which marks the opening of the present century period. To the aristocracy of those two centuries is mainly due the fact that the growth from paternal government and personal rule to direct popular administration was a gradual development, through only occasional scenes of storm and stress, instead of involving a succession of revolutions alternating with civil war. Somers and Godolphin, Walpole and Chatham, Pitt and Shelburne, Eldon and Canning, Grey and Liverpool, Wellington and Durham, Melbourne and Palmerston, were all of this aristocratic class, though of varying degrees in rank and title and with varied views of politics. They filled the chief places in the Government of the country during a period when the people were being slowly trained in the perception and practice of constitutional and religious liberty. At the best such processes are difficult and often prove bitter tests of national endurance; and it was well for Great Britain that the two centuries under review produced a class of able and cultured men who--though naturally aristocratic at heart--were upon the whole honestly bent upon furthering the best interests of the masses. And this despite the mistakes of a Danby or a North.